behaviour change

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Regular handwashing with soap is believed to have substantial impacts on child health in the developing world. Most handwashing campaigns have failed, however, to establish and maintain a regular practice of handwashing. Motivated by scholarship that suggests handwashing is habitual, This study designed, implemented and analyzed a randomized field experiment aimed to test the main predictions of the rational addiction model. To reliably measure handwashing, the researchers developed and produced a novel soap dispenser, within which a time-stamped sensor is embedded.

Open defecation, which is still practiced by about a billion people worldwide, is one of the most compelling examples of how place influences health in developing countries. Efforts by governments and development organizations to address the world's remaining open defecation would be greatly supported by a better understanding of why some people adopt latrines and others do not.

At the end of last year the CLTS Knowledge Hub heard that the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore, in collaboration with UNICEF and the Government of Madhya Pradesh, were sending 630 of their first year management students to spend a week living in 157 open defecation free (ODF) villages. The villages cut across 13 districts in the central Indian State of Madhya Pradesh. Students were asked to verify ODF status of villages through a household survey and early morning and evening inspections of open defecation sites.

This ‘GSF in focus’ case study presents eight lessons learned from the GSF-supported Uganda Sanitation Fund (USF) programme in coordinating, planning, and implementing CLTS at scale through a decentralized government system. The USF is the largest programme of its kind in Uganda. The programme, which began in 2011, is currently implemented by 30 District Local Governments 2 under the overall management of the Ministry of Health. By September 2016, the USF reported helping over three million people live in open defecation free (ODF) environments.

The lack of sanitation facilitates the spread of diarrheal diseases - a leading cause of child deaths worldwide. As of 2012, an estimated 1 billion people still practiced open defecation (OD). To address this issue, one behavioral change approach used is community-led total sanitation (CLTS). It is now applied in an estimated 66 countries worldwide, and many countries have adopted this approach as their main strategy for scaling up rural sanitation coverage.

The Swachh Bharat Mission set a goal to end open defecation by 2019, but state governments must let communities make the change themselves writes WaterAid India's Anil Cherukupalli in The Guardian. Read the full article here

This WSP working paper draws on basic scientific findings from psychology, cognitive science, and behavioural economics to propose a framework of 8 System 1 Principles to support the initiation and maintenance of OD behavior change. In doing so, it builds from the general framework advanced in the World Bank Group’s (2015) World Development Report: Mind, Society, and Behavior, which emphasized three core insights from behavioral science, namely that people think (a) automatically, (b) socially and (c) using mental models that channel their decision-making.

The world’s remaining open defecation is increasingly concentrated in rural India. The Indian government’s efforts to reduce open defecation by providing subsidies for latrine construction have been largely unsuccessful in addressing the problem. It is now clear that behavior change must be the priority if progress on ending open defecation is to be made. While community-led strategies have proven effective in various developing country contexts, there are serious reasons to question whether similar methods can work in rural India.